World News Insights: Opinion Articles

On July 17, 1968, Iraqi officers, some of whom were Baathist and others who were not, launched a successful coup against the ruler at the time, Abdel Rahman Aref. However, the Baathists, who were trying to get rid of their fellow putschists and confront the popular isolation they had been faced…

Hazem Saghieh

If Elon Musk does eventually take over Twitter Inc. he will quickly discover the one feature he’s disparaged the most, bots, are the key to the platform’s ongoing growth. Musk may also be glad to see that its main rival in ephemeral social media, Snap Inc., doesn’t even have that same “problem.” …

Tim Culpan

After weeks of frustration, commercial testing for monkeypox is now going strong in the US and has reduced the backlog. The tests show that, as of Monday, the US had nearly 3,500 cases, among the most in the world. Yet wider access to existing tests hasn’t made it possible to diagnose infections…

Lisa Jarvis

There’s a pretty good chance the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces the numbers on gross domestic product and other macroeconomic data, will declare on Thursday, preliminarily, that real G.D.P. shrank in the second quarter of 2022. Since it has already announced that real G.D.P. shrank in…

Paul Krugman

Elon Musk probably took it for granted that his space exploration company would launch and land the first private space mission to Mars. However, if he thought that SpaceX had cornered the market, he no longer does. This week, two space startups announced a bold plan to send a lander to Mars by…

Adam Minter

What makes our current situation so unnerving is an outbreak of “non-simultaneity.” At least that’s what I recently heard Robert Habeck, Germany’s energy and commerce minister, tell a gathering of German industrialists. What a big word, I thought to myself. And what a difficult — though…

Andreas Kluth

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s an expression that warns people not to want things that are inherently incompatible. China would do well to heed this wisdom. In recent years, the government launched quite a few ambitious top policies that would fundamentally alter its economy…

Shuli Ren

Everyone wants a Rumpelstiltskin in their lives, spinning straw into gold. So when Softbank Group Corp’s Rajeev Misra comes knocking on your door looking for a few billion dollars, you’re in luck. The former Deutsche Bank credit trader, who was instrumental in building up the $100 billion…

Anjani Trivedi

Whenever human societies evolve culturally, they build cohesive and coherent systems of values to guide them. Building these value systems is influenced by the prevailing affective and linguistic experiences of each nation. People articulate their values based on the terminology that is…

Mouchir Basile Aoun

Haven’t the Lebanese people the right to denounce the lack of respect for the constitutional deadlines? Aren’t they allowed to be surprised that a new president has not been elected at the end of the reign of the occupant of the palace, and to dread the much-hoped for election results, which…

Ghassan Charbel

Dictators are rarely funny. Even ones who cultivate bare-chested, bear-hugging personas and have a penchant for extra-long tables. In more than 20 years of watching Russian President Vladimir Putin, I can’t recall him laughing spontaneously, or cracking a joke — certainly not a memorable one…

Clara Ferreira Marques

We all learn from failure. Our mistakes become the bridge to our successes, teaching us what works and what doesn’t, so that the next time we muster the will to try, we’ll succeed. But nefarious actors can also learn from failure. And that, unfortunately, is where we find ourselves with…

Charles M. Blow